"My web site has had a million hits!" Or how about "We have
had over million hits this month alone" Sound impressive
doesn't it? Well not really when you understand that a hit
may sometimes be more of a miss.
When you type the address of a web site into your browser it
sends a request to that web site's server to download the
web page to your computer. That would be counted as one
request or a 'hit' which is then recorded in the server log
files. The problem is though, that web pages are not made up
of plain text alone, but also images, java etc. Every request
for a page also calculates these extra requests for files as
'hits'.
So for instance, if you had a web page that had say
thirty-nine images on it (and some can have more), if this
was downloaded only once that would be forty hits (including
the web page). If the user then went on to a second page that
also contained thirty-nine images that would be, one person,
two page views and eighty hits. Is that impressive? NO, but
high hit counts can sound good.
You see how misleading the term hits can be. Very careful
consideration of this should be taken into account when
placing advertising on web sites. Anyone with a dedicated
hosting account will have full access to their web site
server logs and can tell you instantly what their site
traffic is. What you need to know is the number of page
views or better still the number of unique individuals
requesting only pages and this they should be able to supply
you with. Forget about hits, hits are a big miss.
Some home pages without log file access add page counters or
other types of stealth counters to their site to help keep a
simple track record of how many times that page has been
loaded. These should never be considered when placing
advertising, or really be considered at all as an indicator
to the true number of site visitors. Page counters may count
the same individual loading the same page time and time
again.
It is also quite easy in some instances to download the
counter number file by FTP and reset the figures. Why start
at 1? How about starting at 100000 - looks good? Not really
when you understand how it can be all reset.
This is a link to the server log file for Sutherland-Direct
a business directory we maintain, this is just a small
section for the 31 days of March 2000
http://www.nnh.co.uk/sutherland-direct/server.html
If you take a quick look you can see the server
requests/hits. But more importantly the page views and unique
hosts/individuals. Sutherland-Direct has quite a good traffic
flow but the 'hits' are not particularly high as most pages
only have one image, more importantly though, are the number
of page views and unique/distinct hosts.
If these pages had thirty-nine images per page you could
times the number of requests/hits by this figure for a
greater number of hits. It may sound more impressive to say
307,164 hits in 31 days but really it is just a little bit
of a fib and missing the point of calculating the true
extent of web site traffic.
Hit, miss or unique? It really is important especially when
planning an advertising campaign. Don't make the mistake of
not recognising the difference.
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Publisher: http://nnh.co.uk
Copyright © NNH, nnh.co.uk
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